Entertainment At Iggy's

The man took me out to dinner at Iggy's, an old old favorite that we haven't re-visited since it moved from Regent Hotel to Hilton Hotel. I don't mind Iggy's. Food is innovative without too much of the molecular gastronomy bullshit, dependable and consistently beautiful. The quality of the food is no doubt, first rate. But its ambience meant that stylish jeans and sneakers, flats or whatever would suffice. It's not a restaurant I'd dress up to go to. I was flummoxed by the mass of humans teeming around lobby when lift doors opened at Level 3. Wedding dinner crowd. Iggy's is situated right next to the ballroom. OH. The acoustics of the place are terrible. Every voice is amplified and every sound from the ballroom meant that at many points during the evening, I considered getting out the earplugs.

Frankly, for dinner at S$275++ per head, the service is lacking. Very lacking. Nothing has changed since their days at Regent Hotel. It's the little things that differentiate between a fine-dining restaurant and fabulous service from a mediocre presentation. Iggy's doesn't fulfil our expectations of service. Its service is slip-shod, and can be without warmth, depending on who's serving your table. They really ought to up a notch in terms of training for service staff. For the same price, service will be par excellence at other restaurants, and some restaurants which charge less per head.

Iggy's is known for their ever-changing degustation menu and contemporary take on Japanese kaiseki. It almost always means a heavy swing towards seafood. So I didn't need a special request of a vegetarian set tonight. A scan of the menu confirmed that for this menu, there were only 2 meat items. It wouldn't be difficult for the kitchen to replace those with seafood options, and to surprise me with them. They did so cheerfully.

Instead of 'wagyu tartare and Sarawak black pepper', they gave me a fine grade uni.

I (and a couple of other tables) wanted to murder the woman with a piercing rattle of a voice at the table of four seated across the hall. Our servers apologized to us, but it really wasn't their fault. There was nothing they could do, and they couldn't exactly tell her to tone it down when she wasn't being rowdy and simply was loud, crass and annoying. She could possibly be worse than Ted's talkative new date Cathy, in S3E8 of 'How I Met Your Mother'.

She was impossible to tune out. This woman didn't stop talking! It's as though she didn't need to breathe. The man said something rude about women who can't shut up. (Don't google it.) Hmmmmf. The only times we get a respite- when she was shoveling food into her mouth, and when she went off to the washroom twice in 2.5 hours. Tables looked across one another and smirked, when I involuntarily shrieked a happy, "She went to the washroom! Thank gawwd!" (Unspoken thought, "I hope she gets stuck in the toilet bowl or locked in the cubicle.")

'Egg (beautifully poached, stable), mushroom, pinot noir jus'.

She's otherwise known as long-suffering Kylie's friend. She's Australian, lived in France and California, and now Singapore, didn't pass a job interview in Singapore, compared Australian wines to French ones, and was horribly obnoxious (belittling) to Kylie the whole evening. If I were Kylie, I'd be totally embarrassed to have her as a friend. Unless Kylie is oblivious to it all. I was this close to sending a bottle of S$85 Malbec over to their table with a note which would read, "Please get drunk and shut up." But the man wryly pointed out that, my action would result in us likely ending up in a police station or hospital, with the huge irony of the table having the option to flee the country and still get jobs in their home countries, and we would not have that luxury. DAMMIT. Very reluctantly, I dropped the idea.

Our wine helped. It was a beautiful mellow 1996-something-something-GrandCru. See, this is how much I'm not bothered about wine. While I'm not too hot about new world wines, I don't like easy old worlds either, especially French. Neither can I appreciate the complexity of the really fabulous ones. Can someone pass the bottle of whisky already? It was a good evening still. I was annoyed, but it didn't spoil the date. Entertainment, I view it.

Said no to the main of 'lamb with tomatoes and artichoke'.
It was replaced with an excellent fillet of threadfin on a bed of lentils.